casual philandering with space exploration

Pure research is such a critical part of scientific advancement. Where would we be today without all of the work done by military rocketry and civilian space programs? Without various nations' space programs, scientists working on diseases including malaria, HIV/AIDS, and tuberculosis would not have had access over the last twenty years to high-bandwidth communications services via communications satellites at hospitals, clinics, laboratories, and schools scattered across some of the most remote areas of the African continent---to name just one region with which I have direct involvement. I cannot even begin to stress how important that kind of access is even in this modern age of relatively good 2G/3G coverage (there are still plenty of locations in which we work to cure disease where satellite communications are still a necessity). It made it possible for our scientists to not only train their colleagues in country and raise up new generations of skilled doctors, nurses, and scientists, but also to access the sum total of scientific knowledge from places where good people frequently suffer and die from the kinds of endemic disease rarely seen in the West. Maybe searching web sites or holding conference calls seems droll and ordinary to you, but to our scientists and their colleagues, getting Internet access via satellite in the middle of sub-Saharan Africa during the late 90s and early 00s was revolutionary. So much good work---the fruit of which we see bearing now, like not just one but several effective malaria vaccines as well as mosquito population control programs---became possible, all because fifty years ago, people started "philandering" with space exploration.

How much hubris do you need to think that you alone know how best to allocate not only the scarce resources of this planet but also the lives of every single human being on this planet, and to sit in judgment of what work is worthy and what isn't? To transcend the current boundaries of human knowledge and engineering skill has a direct impact on our (collective) lives, and for the better. This world is not zero-sum; it is not in thermodynamic equilibrium. For some people to work in space for the eventual benefit of mankind as a whole does not require other people to suffer and die of want and neglect (quite the opposite, in fact).